Pro Tips #46: Software Usage Metering

[Esben_D]

One thing I’ve heard through the grapevines is that there a quite a number of people who would like to see Lansweeper do is scanning software usage or software metering. Lansweeper doesn’t offer this functionality, but this month, we’ll explore what you can do to see if specific software is being used. You can find it all in the Pro Tips blog post.

[Mister_Nobody]

You must add to LS event type (code) filter to collect logs.

We have millions events without Succes audit

tblNtlog 12559109 rows

[sanderi]

Thanks @Esben_D for the informative video!

I do have a question though. You mentioned that using file inventory (last accessed) not was a viable option since the command itself would trigger an access, and hence tamper with the result. However, I remember when using SCCM a long time ago, that they were able via hardware inventory (without software metering enabled) to get the LastUsedTime for any exe-file, an information piece that they are exposing in the view v_GS_CCM_RECENTLY_USED_APPS

My guess is that the field they are looking at is the "Date accessed" file property that can be enabled/disabled by setting the reg key NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate.

Is there any way to include this information for all exe-files when performing an agentless Lansweeper inventory?

[Esben_D]

That is an interesting find! Unfortunately, the properties Lansweeper scans are fixed. Here is what the documentation has listed as fields we retrieve:

When reported on, you can see that LastAccessed has todays date which is equal to the asset's last scan date and time.

[sanderi]

Thanks @Esben_D for the quick response, this is very interesting! I will drill in to this further and report my findings.

How can I extend the scope of the scanning to get more results into the tblFileVersions-table? Currently I only get 3 rows for my test machine (iexplore.exe, firefox.exe and microsoftedge.exe). Ideally I would like to include every exe-file on a machine.

[Esben_D]

Here you go: https://community.lansweeper.com/t5/scanning-your-network/scan-file-properties-with-custom-file-scan...